Nope. That an UAV is vulnerable to extreme high power microwaves just doesn't surprise me. There is a lot that would be destroyed with a blast from such a HERF gun. Wifi interfaces and bluetooth devices especially like it. That is why it is usually illegal (and stupid) to use a microwave oven with a damaged containment.

But the inverse square law applies the problem becomes increasing the power output and having good enough fire control to be able to direct the beam onto the target (maneuvering in 3d space) for long enough to be useful as opposed to the trusty Dushka (12.7 mm HMG)

Of course you then just fly the drones with escort drones and when they detect a CREWS attack you whack a hellfire equipped to home on radiation to kill the attacker - you could probably automate this or just have a big red button next to the d

You may be able to cook the coil, but probably not the distributor. You would likely need enough energy to melt the sheet metal in the body of the car to fry an old distributor. It might be possible to fuse the points, but that would be enough energy to bbq the passanger.

I think it's mostly meant as a contrast to a tank, airplaine or any regular car, which are not vulnerable to this type of weapon.

Who says they are not vulnerable? They are to varying degrees.

In fact, each of these items you mention are *tested* or have design tolerance to such weapons. The military pays close attention to such things when they buy them and I've seen the results of testing on commercially available cars.

The REAL issue here is how vulnerable drones are to disruptions in communications and navigation data that flows over RF based links. That is the reason we don't want to be solely dependent on them.

The impresssssion I got was the article was talking mostly about hobby grade quadracopters, with perhaps a webcam controlled by a 2.4 GHz hobbiest remote controller, not military grade UAVs; a few may have been commercial grade units marketed for industrial or law enforcement use.

Firing up a transmitter powerfull enough to jam a military grade drone flying over a battlefield is the shurest way I know of to find out if Allah realy has 72 virgins waiting for you in the promised land.

The amazing part here is there doesn't seem to be much basic 'offline' intelligence built into them so that if control signals are scrambled or lost it can fly straight and level until conditions improve.

They don't have sensors to identify landmarks - unless they're being piloted remotely by camera that's no use. Even so, if GPS is denied, they can use inertial navigation and compass heading to get pretty darn close to their failsafe waypoints.

I have only thought about this for five seconds, but here is my solution: Use a $5 magnetic compass to maintain a constant heading until you are far enough from the jammer to pick up the GPS signal again. Then use GPS to fly home.

I don't know about all UAVs but the U.S. military ones are programmed to fly home if they get confused. Dunno how they find home if they lose GPS but at least they thought about the issue.

Inertial Navigation Systems [wikipedia.org]. Not as accurate as GPS, but good enough to at least not land in enemy territory. And hypothetically by the time you got within a few miles of the base, the GPS would be back online.

This is a fairly solved problem, actually. Serious navigation systems continuously estimate their performance, and have redundant sensors/etc. When an airliner is approaching an airport via clouds the pilot will not attempt the approach if the navigation system reports that its accuracy isn't sufficient to guarantee the avoidance of obstacles (the required performance gets tighter as you get closer to the ground, up to the max of Cat III ILS which basically can land a plane with no visibility at all which

If they're not protected against RF then it doesn't matter how much offline intelligence you build in, because it will still get scrambled by HERF. You have to not only consider how much noise your design will generate, but what kind of electrical noise in your circuit will be generated by excessive radio noise. If you've bought an Arduino and an IMU off the shelf you have none of that.

You will get intelligent drones that can fly standalone, without any remote control. From there is is a very small step to automate the "kill human"decision as well

Termintor drones are not as far away as you might think.

The other solution is not to make them more resistant to such attacks, but to make them so cheap you do not have to worry to loose a drone. You just pcik up a new one, use like one uses other munition/rockets.

You can actually legally own a Bofors L/60 towed anti aircraft autocannon in the US. Drones are vulnerable to one of those too, along with pretty much everything else less beefy than a main battle tank.

The assumption, which I hold to be quite valid, is that as with all other government weapons systems, the fear is that they are to be used on the people of the U.S. As they continue to pass laws which enable them to do so, the concern deepens. And I'm somewhat left confused about any law that has ever been written and simply not implemented. Laws start with a desire or need to address a concern. Lately, it has been about enabling the government to do more than they have been allowed to do in the past.

New Zealand security researcher Stuart MacIntosh told delegates at the Kiwicon 7 conference in Wellington that some vulnerable drone technology designed in the hobby space had trickled down into use by police and commercial operators.

Which makes it notable. Before you use a consumer-oriented item for more serious use, you need to evaluate its fitness for purpose.

Of course, you might go ahead and use it anyway - that's what risk assessment is all about.

New Zealand security researcher Stuart MacIntosh told delegates at the Kiwicon 7 conference in Wellington that some vulnerable drone technology designed in the hobby space had trickled down into use by police and commercial operators.

Which makes it notable. Before you use a consumer-oriented item for more serious use, you need to evaluate its fitness for purpose.

Of course, you might go ahead and use it anyway - that's what risk assessment is all about.

Also true...but honestly, I can't recall the last time cops had to worry about crooks with HERF guns. It would be a lot easier, safer and cheaper for the bad guys to simply *shoot* at the drones in these situations. We're not talking about flights of Predators or Reapers flying thousands of feet up, backed by a Gorgon's Eye implementation. We're talking about what's basically a glorified RC copter flying at hundreds of feet.

I will now coin a new acronym..."KEDW," or "Kinetic Energy Directed Weapon," also known as a "gun," and go speak to a conference about how it is a much worse threat than this...because not only can it shoot down police drones, it can hurt people too!

Well, if you can get a drone within 50 yards of me, I could possibly hit it with the shotgun. Outside of that range, things get a whole lot more difficult and it's going to be impossible outside of about 100 yards. Trying to hit a drone using a rifle is about the best you can hope for beyond 100 yards, and those shots would be one in a million.

So, if the drone is flying higher than about 150 feet it is unlikely to be in danger from any kinetic weapon carried by the perp.

Against stationary targets maybe, or if the UAV is moving towards you. If it's moving quickly tangentially to you, good luck. Also, UAV's come in many sizes and shapes. Unless you know for sure either its altitude or size, you won't know where to aim. As in, "Is that a small UAV at 150 feet, a medium UAV at 500 feet, or a large UAV at a 1,000 feet?"

It will also most probably be short range cause unlike the army and NSA police needs a warrant to snoop on half the city at once, which one of those flying at 1000 feet would probably be doing.Also, if it's gonna cover an area effectively it will have to be capable of hovering in urban environments without crashing into buildings when wind hits it from one side AND should it fall down on unsuspecting civilians it should not be able to crush and kill anyone.Al

If I recall correctly that kind of shooting is effective up to 600 meters (concentrated firing).

It would be extremely effective.

*if* you concentrate the AK47 fire at the personnel in the portable trailer containing the drone-operator control stations, and/or their families in the case of a domestic conflict. It makes it very hard to concentrate on targeting/killing civilians with a drone if you're worried sick about your entire family being executed and your home being burned to the ground while you're busy.

There are no "rules" in a domestic civil war and military personnel's families would be high on

I think anyone who has ever been bird hunting (or clay pigeon shooting) knows exactly how hard it is to hit small moving targets hundreds of feet in the air.

Yes, but two things. One, drones of the sort described in the report don't move around much when being used, and definitely not at the speed of a clay pigeon. Two, you get more than one shot at it. Three, you can use a scope, or a shotgun with a smaller or larger choke as you like. Four, even if you miss, just shooting at the drone may be enough to get them to move it, thus succeeding in impeding its usefulness.

And five, the difficulty of shooting a moving object with a projectile is less than that of s

Yeah, this shouldn't really be an Earth-shattering surprise. In fact, I've always thought that the DOD interest in directed energy weapons was specifically for shooting down cheap flimsy things like drones. Even countries with tiny military budgets could build large fleets of drones that we would have a hard time shooting down with conventional missiles. I just figured that HERF weapons and the like were the simplest solution to swatting a lot of lightweight threats in a reliable cost-effective way.

Sure, but this article isn't even about anti-drone warfare. The researcher states: "A lot of these UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were not really designed with security in mind apart from some that may be destined for law enforcement use or military use."

This research is not invalid, but it's akin to showing how you can listen in on some walkie-talkies from radio shack. There certainly are analogous concerns in designing military command & control systems, but they are about 70 years past this leve

Isn't that kind of like saying that the average commercial building has surveillance cameras vulnerable to a water gun filled with paint? This stuff is designed to watch traffic, or survey land, and so on. If they need to suppress a riot they'll probably send in the APCs.

A HERF is a converted microwave oven. They usually range in the 800-1500 W range. That is a directed energy weapon. It's also bad for other electronics and illegal in most countries (EM emission limits and all that).

The catch here is they are not talking about military drones.From the article."You can walk all over [the Parrot AR Drone] with frequency-hopping spread spectrum... you can fly a radio plane near an AR drone and it will very quickly get packet loss," MacIntosh said."You can interfere with a toy.... And Slashdot tumbles farther down the FUD hole.

First of all this article is not even talking about Military drones!From the article.""You can walk all over [the Parrot AR Drone] with frequency-hopping spread spectrum... you can fly a radio plane near an AR drone and it will very quickly get packet loss," MacIntosh said."

eww you can jam a toy.... Really Slashdot you are now the National Enquire.

Surely our beloved overlords already have planned for and created such weapons and technology. Surely they wouldn't have spend eleventy billion dollars producing aircraft that can be downed by a 'more powerful radio'. There is probably a pilot contractor riding in each UAV as a backup. After all, un-maned != un-contractor'd.

It really depends where the US is wrt the "planned for and created" vs prototype that can be sold to the US gov vs what the US gov wants to risk.
All the US gov needs is a tool to watch, soak up signals and use for double tap missile strikes.
All the US export market needs is a tool to watch, soak up signals and to enjoy ongoing 'parts' and 'service' contracts.
The contractors are happy with every sale, the long term contracts, the missions work out and US gov risks little in the way of new tech with any cr

1 design and build a drone that is "cheap" by DOD standards2 as a first stage after %time% without a gps lock enable a GO HOME (use terrain recog)3 stage 2 (after %time% X 1.N) it either A climbs to MAX HEIGHT B finds the nearest "valid target" and then it self destructs

i would of course make sure that the destruct package had a decent amount of BANG

The Soviet attempt to train anti-tank dogs was...less than successful. The Russians trained their dogs with their own diesel-fueled tanks, which smelled different from German gasoline-fueled tanks. In the field, they discovered that this meant they had trained the dogs to blow up Soviet tanks but not German ones.

You know, when Han used his Tricorder to restimulate the active particule neutrino phase shifters, which resulted in a plasma beam that disrupts the life-support system on any craft that flies slower than 22 parsecs.

You know, when Han used his Tricorder to restimulate the active particule neutrino phase shifters, which resulted in a plasma beam that disrupts the life-support system on any craft that flies slower than 22 parsecs.